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B. Kettler, ISX (1/99) 2 Agenda Brief overview of CoABS program –Caveat 1: Views are mine, not DARPA's (etc.) –Caveat 2: Program is young (6 months) and still evolving… (more will be known after late January workshop in Las Vegas) –Caveat 3: Program just beginning to reach out to wider community (FIPA, OMG, etc.) Overview of The Grid –Caveat 4: Very much a Work in Progress (2-3 months old) –We need input!

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B. Kettler, ISX (1/99) 8 The Grid The Grid is an infrastructure supporting the semantic interoperability of agent groups, each with potentially different agent architectures e.g., A group of OAA agents talking to a group of RETSINA agents Analogous to the Internets support for interoperability among networks with different protocols GA = Grid-aware Agents

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B. Kettler, ISX (1/99) 10 Grid Development Approach (contd) Design/Develop Prototypes –build something (and they will come…) a strawman versus waiting on the definitive specification initially implement base subset of use cases deploy and let community experiment with it –multiple implementations of a service are desirable –enumerate design assumptions & issues many are open research problems! Enumerate additional requirements –from operational/functional TIEs, scientific TIEs –incrementally refine, replace, update service specifications and implementations

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B. Kettler, ISX (1/99) 11 Some Initial Simplifying Assumptions Focus on functionality, vs. performance –Real Grid must consider fault tolerance, failure recovery, comm bandwidth, CPU cycles, etc. –scalability will be paramount Keep it simple (at least for now) –define a minimal set of Grid services agent communities also will have their own services –define a minimal set of messages an agent on the Grid must support